Duminda, living with his wife and two young children in damp, squalid conditions at a G4S house in Coventry.
Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

The cramped upstairs box room was meant to be used by one of Duminda’s children, but it is not in a fit state. An old mattress is propped up against the wall, and behind it is an expanse of black-green mould. In the downstairs bathroom, there is similarly widespread damp, and a smell that suggests the problem is serious. “We worry about the kids’ health,” Duminda tells me.

He and his partner, Kriti, are both from Sri Lanka. If either of them were to return, he says, they would be at risk of violence and imprisonment. He received his last asylum refusal from the Home Office two years ago; she was turned down around the same time. They are now preparing a fresh claim, and anxiously waiting.

Though Duminda has done voluntary work for the homeless charity Crisis, the law dictates that neither of them can accept paid employment. So in the meantime, they and their two kids get £152 a week to live on, and accommodation in this three-bedroom house in a Coventry backstreet, provided – thanks to a contract with the Home Office – by G4S. The multinational security and services firm that infamously failed to supply enough security guards to the 2012 London Olympics, G4S has been the focus of a series of negative headlines about its running of prisons, deportation arrangements for people refused asylum, children’s services and more.

When the family moved in, Duminda says all four of them fell ill (“Cough, cold, fever - how was it possible that everyone got sick?”), which he now traces to the all-pervading damp. For around six weeks, they had to cope without a washing machine or oven. After repeated calls to G4S and social services, those problems were eventually fixed, but a pattern was established. “G4S never seem to keep a record of what we tell them,” says Duminda. “No one is accountable.”

It is the responsibility of our Compass contractors to provide accommodation that is safe, habitable, fit for purpose

UK Home Office

In the downstairs bathroom, the shower unit seems to be coming away from the wall, and the handle on one of its taps has broken off. All the furniture that has been supplied to the family is faulty in some way, and the damage is so uniform that it almost seems to have been done methodically. Duminda says they have asked G4S to help, but keep getting stonewalled. “They always say: ‘This is not broken – you can use it,’” says Kriti.

They emailed G4S photos of the damp walls two months ago, but have got no further than a contractor finally turning up in December, and telling them he was going to formally report their problems. A malfunctioning heating system means that the house is either freezing cold or so hot that it inflames their baby daughter’s eczema.

Perhaps the worst problem, though, has been mice. Again, repeated calls to G4S eventually led to a man arriving with traps, and then poison, but Duminda says he fears the problem will come back sooner or later, not least because of holes in the walls and skirting boards. Around Christmas, Kriti opened a box of Weetabix and found a mouse inside.

A child’s toy sits next to a mouldy wall where Duminda lives with his wife and two young children in damp conditions at a G4S house in Coventry. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

“I try to teach my kids that there are British standards: that if somebody makes a complaint, people will follow a procedure,” says Duminda. “I thought health and safety was the British thing: that in any house you go to, that’s what the law requires.”

Around 40,000 people are currently housed by the Home Office while their claims for refugee status are decided. The government has a responsibility to find asylum seekers temporary homes if they can prove they are either destitute or at risk of destitution in the next two weeks - and since 2012, as part of plans aimed at saving around £140m a year, responsibility for such housing has been split between three companies: Serco, G4S and the Clearsprings Group, the corporate logistics giants that now see to a huge swath of what was once the public sector. They are known as Compass contractors (it stands for Commercial and Operational Managers Procuring Asylum Support Services), and their current arrangements are set to run until September 2019.

Although they rent the homes that they supply to asylum seekers from private landlords, the companies are refugees’ only point of contact for repairs, maintenance and complaints; and, as many people see it, the homes they oversee are all too often full of dirt, vermin, damp and broken furniture.

The Home Office tells me that “it is the responsibility of our Compass contractors to provide accommodation that is safe, habitable, fit for purpose” and which meets legal housing standards, and that “we demand the highest standards from our contractors and their accommodation, and monitor them closely to ensure this is maintained”. The evidence, however, suggests that the flats and houses in question often fall far below those “highest standards”.

The back of Duminda and Kriti’s house in Coventry. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

A year ago almost to the day, the pressure group Migrant Voice put out a report based on research done in the West Midlands, which shone light on what far too many refugees have to put up with. The accounts people gave were plain: “The house is in ruins”; “One room is always wet when it rains, so no one sleeps there”; “Currently I am experiencing a horde of flies because of dead rats in the kitchen”. Concerns were also voiced about the way that people’s complaints were often ignored. The report was taken up by the House of Commons home affairs select committee, whose own 2017 inquiry into housing for asylum seekers acknowledged that “in too many cases, providers are placing people in accommodation that is substandard, poorly maintained and, at times, unsafe”.

You can actually hear the rats, chewing and gnawing at the floorboards, and running around. And that’s scary

Miriam, Birmingham

Forty minutes’ drive from Duminda and Kriti’s house, in the outer suburbs of Birmingham, I meet Miriam and her four-year-old daughterin the cramped flat in which they have lived for three years. Miriam is originally from Zimbabwe. She says she was driven out when the people then violently seizing farms associated her and her family with wealthy white landowners (“I have friends who were tortured; they were made to sit on fires”). She has been bouncing around the asylum system for many years, has had her case refused on several occasions, but says she now plans a fresh claim.

The two of them share a single bedroom, a tiny kitchen and a bathroom. The wallpaper is streaked with what looks like nicotine stains. There is a huge single-glazed bay window that looks very old, whose frames are coated in mould, with condensation clearly visible on the inside of the panes. Miriam says it lets in draughts: “My daughter’s asthmatic. It definitely worsens it.” She says that when she has raised the dire state of the windows with G4S, she has been told that the issue is “not a priority. That was it.”

Miriam, outside the mouldy and rat-infested home she shares with her daughter in Birmingham. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

In the kitchen, the cooker looks like it was taken from a tip. All the kitchen units are chipped. And then there are the rats. “I’m scared of them,” says Miriam. “You can actually hear them, chewing and gnawing at the floorboards, and running around. And that’s scary.”

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She has stuffed the obvious cavities with carrier bags, in an attempt to keep the rats out. She pulls a big Morrisons one out of a nearby hole. “Look, they’ve been at it,” she says, and sure enough, the end of the bag stuffed into the hole has been chewed into strips.

When she first reported this problem, she says it took four months for G4S to send a pest-control specialist to deal with it. “I didn’t have the problem for a while, until about three months ago. Then I rang them and said: ‘The problem is starting again.’ But nobody’s been since.”

When I contact G4S, it sends me a statement from its managing director for policing and Compass services, John Whitwam. He says that the company conducts more than 4,000 monthly inspections of housing it provides to asylum seekers, which “inevitably reveal some defects in properties and their inventory that require repair or replacement.” The company, he goes on, has “strict rules that dictate the timeframe in which defects must be resolved, ranging from 28 days to two hours in the most urgent circumstances”. The company’s system for complaints, he says, “demonstrates a service which is working well”.

Much the same goes for Serco, which sees to housing for asylum seekers in the north-west of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. “In the early years of the contract, Serco found it hard to source high-quality accommodation, particularly as the number of asylum seekers in our care has doubled since the contract started in 2012,” goes a statement from its Compass contract director. “However, we are confident that we successfully addressed these issues some time ago and that we are providing decent, safe accommodation for all the vulnerable people in our care that meets all the legal and contractual standards.”

In Bristol, I meet Aman, a twentysomething single mother from Pakistan who says the impossibility of life in her home country was sealed when she walked out on an arranged marriage. We first talk in the Malcolm X Community Centre in the St Paul’s district of the city, where an organisation called Bristol Refugee Rights assists people with their asylum cases, and offers help with the basics of living. Her latest claim for asylum, she explains, was refused, and she has now been sent an official deportation notice, though the fact she has a child means she is still entitled to housing and financial support. Her son is a toddler, and was born in Britain.

During the past few years, Aman has passed through three bedsits, all overseen by the Clearsprings Group – which, like G4S, has been the subject of widespread complaints. In the first, she says, the property was riddled with damp. “And the window was broken: you couldn’t shut it properly. I was saying to them: ‘Please can you fix these things?’ But they didn’t fix anything.” She says she was also permanently kept awake by the dripping of a broken tap, but for fear of repercussions, she didn’t make any complaints for 18 months.

She next lived in a tiny flat on the outer edge of Bristol, in a chaotic shared house where she had a particularly disruptive neighbour. “She was making noise all the time, having a man in her room. I tried to say to her: ‘At least during the night, please be quiet, so we can have some sleep.’ But no, that was not happening. Once I recorded her voice, and I sent it to her [in a text], and I said: ‘Look, this is how loud you are.’ This was going on at 2am, and it went on until 5am.

Jenny, who fled from the DR Congo, but has been refused asylum, is now living on charity handouts. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

“At nine o’clock, she knocked on my door with three other women and said: ‘How dare you record me and then text me? I will kill you. I’ll put hot oil on your face.’” By this time, Aman had discovered that the keys all the residents had for the front door also opened the doors of every individual bedsit, something that now had a terrifying aspect, so she put her bed against the door, and called the police.

She says neither the officers who saw to the incident, nor social services, nor the Clearsprings Group took her fears seriously, and all insisted she returned to the flat. “I refused,” she says, “because my son was waking up during the night, and just repeating: ‘Mummy, the lady is going to kill you.’”

She now lives in another cramped flat closer to the city centre. When I visit, the scene is grimly familiar: a shared house whose walls do not seem to have been decorated for decades, and whose communal living area contains a filthy old sofa. As its controls have long since fallen off, the shower is unusable. “We’ve complained, and no one has come to repair it,” says Aman. When I send an account of her experiences and complaints, the Clearsprings Group refuses to comment.

Aman is not the first person I meet who talks about suffering from depression and anxiety. “They make us think because we are asylum seekers, we are not human,” she says. “And the tragedy is, most asylum seekers think if we complain, or even say anything, we will get deported.”

They put me in a house with two people in each bedroom. No privacy. And in the winter, no heater

Jenny, Manchester

My final appointment is in Manchester, where on a cold Friday morning, I turn up at the basement offices of the human rights charity Rapar (Refugee and Asylum Seeker Participatory Action Research), which works with an array of refugees. Among them are two men from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who spend a moving 90 minutes explaining their predicament.

Both are political activists, attached to a movement called Apareco, (Alliance des patriotes pour la refondation du Congo) opposed to the regime of the president, Joseph Kabila. Philippe is a father of four, who says his eldest son has been the victim of a political murder; Jenny is the only interviewee I meet who has no problem giving me his real name, seemingly because he has nothing left to lose.

Both have had their claims for asylum turned down, but are hardly underground: they say the Home Office has their contact details and knows their whereabouts, but will not send them back to the DRC because officials know what a dangerous place it is. In an email, a Home Office spokesperson says: “In general, persons who have a significant and visible profile in Apareco are likely to be at risk of persecution but low-profile members are unlikely to face a risk on return … Each case, however, needs to be considered on its individual facts.” What that currently means for Jenny and Philippe is a Kafkaesque limbo. Because neither of them lives as part of a family, they receive no financial support, and have no idea what the future will hold.

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Having put in his first asylum claim, Jenny was initially given accommodation in the Midlands, again run by G4S. “There is no quality,” he says. “They put me in a house with two people in each bedroom. No privacy. You have a difficult life. And in the winter, no heater.” He says this was the case 75% of the time. “And water leaked from the bathroom into the kitchen.”

When his last asylum claim was refused, and his accommodation and support payments (of £36.95 a week) came to an end, he fell into a mind-boggling life of homelessness, jumping trains to such places as Newcastle, Stockton-on-Tees and Cardiff – wherever he heard that help was available for destitute asylum seekers – sometimes finding himself in court for fare evasion, and constantly relying on charity. The Red Cross, he says, would give him £15 vouchers that were meant to last two weeks, and he would regularly sleep on the floors of churches, as happened when he was in Sheffield.

“They call it a night shelter,” he says. “You turn up by 9pm to 9.30pm, queueing outside. Sometimes it’s very cold. They pick the first 20 who come. When you get a place, you have 20 minutes to have a coffee, in the kitchen. They give you maybe bread and butter. You can eat, quick. No shower. And at 10 o’clock, the light gets switched off. Nobody speaks.”

He is now living in a room provided by the Boaz Trust, a charity supporting destitute asylum seekers. What is most sobering about the conversation is the clear sense of someone who currently has no rights. “No, no, no, no – no rights in this country. Every asylum seeker: they have no rights.”

Philippe has a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, and has been on antidepressants. His last asylum claim was turned down in 2015, when he was living in accommodation provided by Serco, whose spokesperson later assures me that even if asylum seekers in its care are served notice of a refusal and told when their housing and cash support will end, “there are some cases where Serco continues to provide asylum seekers with accommodation beyond this date at our expense, as we feel it is the right thing to do”.

This did not seem to apply to Philippe. “They said to me: ‘You are refused, you have to leave.’ I said: ‘Please let me take my time, because I’m someone who suffers mentally.’ They said: ‘No, you have to leave.’” He has since slept in a Mancunian church, thanks to its Congolese pastor, and is currently moving between friends’ floors. Occasionally, he says, he has been forced to sleep on the streets, near Piccadilly station.

“I have no choice but to stay here,” he says, matter-off-factly, “but it is exhausting.”

There is then a long pause, as I struggle to think of anything to say in response, and stare at the mess of inconsistency and impossibility I have tried to get down in my notes. Eventually, he breaks the silence. “Life is nothing,” he says.